Most users thinking about purchasing a product like to experience the product prior to purchase. This is especially true in the case of expensive products or products that a user will use often and over a long period of time. For instance, a vehicle is one relatively expensive product that many people use regularly and over a period of at least several years after purchase. When purchasing a new vehicle, most users still go to a car dealership to sit in several different vehicle locations (e.g., driver's seat, passenger's front seat, a rear seat, etc.) in different vehicles, feel the materials used to construct the vehicles and play with vehicle features. In many cases the most important consideration for a vehicle user may be how the vehicle performs when driven. For instance, when selecting a vehicle to purchase, many users consider vehicle quickness and speed, smoothness of ride, turning responsiveness, braking responsiveness, engine power and torque, blind spots when driving, engine noise, passenger compartment noise, etc. To test these vehicle characteristics, most vehicle users drive a vehicle in many different environments (e.g., on a highway, on side streets, etc.) prior to deciding on a type of vehicle to purchase.
Once a user has decided to purchase a specific vehicle type, the user selects a desired set of options which, like the vehicle itself, can often be experienced at a dealership as most auto dealers maintain an inventory of different vehicles with different option combinations. After an initial option combination is selected, a dealer can relatively quickly generate a price for a vehicle in inventory or for a vehicle that has to be ordered from a factory. Here, the user can tweak options to see the effect on cost and can ultimately make a decision to purchase a specific vehicle with a specific set of options.
The internet and other technical developments have made it possible to at least visualize different product options where those options cannot be seen in person at an vehicle dealer facility. For instance, in the case of shopping for a vehicle, almost all vehicle manufacturers now maintain websites where users can select vehicle options, materials and colors causing a software engine to render an image or view of a resulting vehicle. For instance, a user may select black leather for a seating material instead of black cloth causing the engine to generate interior vehicle images that show the black leather option. Thus, even if an auto dealer does not have vehicles with all of the options desired by a user, the user typically has at least some way to visually experience how an option value affects a final vehicle's appearance.
Individual office furniture products can typically be experienced in ways similar to a vehicle prior to purchase. To this end, office furniture dealers often maintain samples of most products manufactured by a supplier in inventory at a sales facility to show to perspective users. For instance, where a supplier manufactures five different types of task chairs, a dealer may have one instance of each of the five task chairs in inventory for users to sit in, adjust, feel and experience. To supplement the five chairs, the dealer may maintain an inventory of fabrics and finish samples for the chairs for users to view and feel. A similar sub-set of inventory may be maintained for desks, tables, side chairs, lounges, privacy screens, space dividing partial wall structures, electrical systems, lighting devices, collaboration products, full wall structures, floor structures, ceiling structures, etc. Manufacturers also supplement dealer inventories by providing images of typical office, workstation, conference and common area affordance configurations as well as software applications that allow users to see affordances with different option sets (e.g., material and finish colors, mechanical options (e.g., arms or no arms on a chair, a head rest or no head rest on a chair, etc.).
While some office furniture users purchase affordances on an item by item basis dictated by personal appearance, feel and functional preferences, many office furniture manufacturers and dealers as well as users have recognized that office affordances and systems can have many different profound and valuable effects on office activities if designed and installed in an overall optimized fashion. For instance, a well designed and appealing office space may operate as a branding tool for an enterprise facility to create a positive impression on both users and employees. As another instance, proper placement of refueling stations (e.g., coffee and refreshment stations or spaces) can have an advantageous effect on spontaneous collaboration between employees as employees encounter each other throughout a work day. As another instance, properly placed divider screens can increase employee sense of privacy and result in higher quality focused activity. As yet one other instance, locally available conference spaces or spaces specially configured to support telepresence activities can encourage a greater amount of collaboration between employees. As another instance, the amount of natural light in a workspace can have an advantageous effect on employee sense of well being.
Unfortunately, unlike a vehicle or a single piece of office furniture, there is no easy way to experience an entire enterprise space fitted out with an affordance set in a realistic way without actually manufacturing and installing a full set of affordances. As a simple example, assume that a user intends to provide 80 workspaces on a single floor of her office building along with two refueling stations, 2 large conference spaces and 4 small conference spaces as well as 6 telepresence spaces that are specially fitted out to facilitate telepresence conferencing with remote participants where the 80 spaces are divided among first, second and third departments to include 20 spaces, 25 spaces and 35 spaces, respectively. Here, after the user selects different affordances and options and specifies at least a tentative budget, an interior designer takes the user's requirements and a plan view (e.g. a blue print) of the enterprise space and uses basic rules of thumb to lay out affordances to meet the user's requirements. For instance, one rule of thumb may be that the refueling stations should be spaced apart and yet generally within a couple minutes walk from any workstation or office in the space. Another rule of thumb may be that a receptionist area or desk be near a front entry to the space. Other rules of thumb may require that workspaces for each department be located proximate each other, maximum travel time to a rest room from any workstation, maximum exposure to natural light, a minimum distance between adjacent workstations, etc.
In the above example, after a designer lays out affordances based on user requirements or preferences and general rules of thumb, the designer may be able to generate a top plan view of the enterprise space with affordances installed along with some space typical images including a perspective view of an exemplary executive's office, an exemplary manager's office, an exemplary workstation used by a general employee, an exemplary refueling station and exemplary perspective views of a large conference space, a small conference space and a telepresence space. In particularly sophisticated cases, an architect, often times with help from a software programmer, may also generate a video that simulates a virtual walk through the enterprise space so that a user can see a scripted perspective of the space design. For instance, the simulated video may present a point of view that travels by a receptionist's station, by several workstations, into an executive's office, and so on.
While the above described tools for a designed enterprise space can give a perspective user some sense of what an installed design may look like, the experience afforded by these tools is nowhere near realistic. For instance, none of the tools described above enables a user to sense a noise level at any location in the designed space. As another instance, none of the tools enables a user to experience how natural light subtends different affordances or workstations or offices in the space. As still one other instance, none of the tools enables a user to view the space and affordances from any locations off a scripted video path to experience, first hand, how affordances provide privacy to employees in different spaces or other space characteristics.
In many cases large office space and furniture manufacturers maintain their own facilities or even a campus of buildings where their products and services are staged to be seen and experienced by perspective users. Here, many different affordance settings including different materials, finishes and affordance combinations are staged so that users can experience many different arrangements and combinations. Unfortunately, most users cannot travel to a manufacturer's facility to experience staged affordance settings first hand and, even where a user can travel to a manufacturer's facility, the staged affordances cannot possibly represent all affordance settings and option combinations.
In addition, operating characteristics of an affordance setting are highly dependent on location and facility specific environmental parameters that vary appreciably from the parameters at a manufacturer's staged location. For instance, sound travel is greatly affected by the locations of structural walls at a user's facility that are almost always different than the wall locations at a manufacturer's facility. As another instance, window locations and configurations at a user's facility that directly affect the amount and pattern of natural light that enters a space are usually different than the window locations and configurations at a manufacturer's facility. For this reason, even where a user likes the operating characteristics of an affordance set at a manufacturer's facility, the operating characteristics cannot reflect characteristics of the same affordance set once installed at the user's facility.
Moreover, even if an affordance configuration can present an environment where a user can experience at least some space characteristics e.g., sound travel, light intensities, lines of sight, etc.), where the sources of those characteristics routinely change over time, an employee's perception of those characteristics in a contrived and controlled setting at a manufacturer's facility may not reflect reality and in fact may be misleading. To this end, in most real world environments sound volume within common spaces or travel paths through a space vary during the course of a day. For instance, in the morning when employees arrive at work and at lunch time, the number of sounds and sound volume within common and travel spaces are typically higher than at other times. For this reason, while a user may like sound characteristics while located at a real world affordance configuration within a manufacturer's facility at one time, if the user were to experience the same space during a high sound period, the user may be completely dissatisfied. Similar dissatisfaction can occur as a result of changing lighting, visual characteristics and other characteristics during the course of a typical day in any real world space.
In addition to not providing a realistic experience, none of the above described tools enables a user to easily change affordances or affordance options and see how those changes affect the visual appearance of the space, space operating characteristics (e.g., distribution of natural light, sound level, traffic patterns in the space, unscheduled collaboration, etc.), privacy, etc. As a simple example, where all task seating material in a space is initially teal and a user wants to view the space with brown material instead of teal, changing out the materials in the space is a complex and arduous process and, in known systems, may require input from or the expertise of a software programmer and/or a designer. Because the task is complex and coordination of the task would be time consuming, in most cases a user simply foregoes the process of generating new images or views or a new walk through video and instead relies on their imagination to develop a sense of how a color change may affect a space experience. Even where a user commences the process of generating tools to show the visual and other effects of a few changes, in most cases no user would waist her time or effort on generating tools to visualize more than a small number of affordance and option changes. In addition, in no case would changing appearance or options of affordances result in a system where a user's experience of a designed space approaches reality.